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Some techniques that have been published in recent decades and have been read and applied several times by families with young children are the techniques of “controlled crying” or otherwise “sleep training”.

These are methods in which parents place the infant in its crib to sleep and when it cries and asks for them, they leave it for an increasingly long period of time before offering it their presence and the comfort it seeks.

Books with these techniques did not become popular because they tell the truth, but because they exonerate parents who have desired a continuous night sleep. With the usual excuse that the mother is rested in order to adequately care for the baby, techniques are applied that have no connection with the understanding of human biology and infant sleep and that, as time goes by, the negative impact they have on the psychology and proper emotional maturation of the child is studied and confirmed.

Infants from the age of 8 months face separation anxiety from their parents, which lasts until they understand that the parents will return every time they leave, which is likely to extend a little after the first 2 years of life. Every time babies sleep, they face the temporary loss of their parent, and therefore the temporary loss of their security.

This leads to a peak in separation anxiety and intense stress if parents do not respond immediately. Also, babies do not have the same sense of time as adults. Even a minute of intense crying and anxiety can be a century for them.

Letting an infant who has severe separation anxiety cry themselves to sleep, so as not to be spoiled in our arms, leads to emotional problems, blocking of the neurons that determine the development of the prefrontal lobe and the release of large amounts of cortisol, which is the stress hormone and has been found to be elevated in the saliva of infants who underwent this method even three days later. Cortisol can lead to dysfunction of many systems of the body, even to the destruction of nerve synapses.

Babies who finally stopped crying as a result of applying “controlled crying” methods did not stop because they were trained to sleep, but because they despaired, as they realized that their crying, the only way to communicate with us, is futile and ineffective. They are therefore taught not to self-regulate, which does not exist in infancy, but not to seek and expect help and support when they need it.

Thus, in the long term, the bonding and approach systems between parents and children are weakened, as are the subsequent relationships they will create.

Sleep is a natural process, which stabilizes between the ages of 2-4, perhaps even earlier in some children. We do not need to subject our children and ourselves to such psychologically damaging and dangerous processes. No method that has been created to help parents sleep better at night should be done at the expense of the mental, emotional and developmental needs of children.